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Of Dinosaurs and Critical Thinking

I have recently become fascinated with the site for Genesis Park, a website that is devoted “to showcase the evidence that dinosaurs and man were created together and have co-existed throughout history.” Look, I don’t really care what you believe, if you gotta believe in creationism, believe in it if that’s what gets you out of bed. Yet, I plead, I beg, nay, I implore you, stop making dumb people dumber. I have spent hours on this site reading the essays and “evidence” of man and dinosaurs walking the Earth together and I have pushed beyond the headaches and strain that emerge when a critical mind tries to find logic in the illogical. There are several Professors and college educated people that submit to the Genesis Park site and that is supposed to lend to their credibility, which I suppose it does, to anyone that wants to believe that our planet is only a few thousand years old and would like to avoid the mountain of evidence that points to a few billion years instead. These people really want us to believe that we existed along side dinosaurs. Okay, so in the interest of science, reality and above all, comedy via parody, I would like to show you, using critical thinking, why these folk are foolish as a monkey with an impossible to peal banana. I will make with the critical now, using the six tests for critical thinkers to utilize.

Example 1, Falsifiability; Man lived along with dinosaurs: Really, you think that man could have survived and thrived using primitive tools in a world populated with millions of really big, nasty creatures? In the early days of man it would have been an eat or be eaten scenario, especially since you would be being hunted by, or be hunting, very large creatures. Sure, the Bushmen in Africa can take down an adult elephant but it takes a few men and a lot of work and calories. So what would a tribe of Bushmen use to take down, let’s say, an Allosaurus? Could they, would they even attempt to take on a forty foot long, three ton beast with six inch, razor sharp teeth that could nail a dead run over 25 miles per hour? Sure, the believers will say that the early folk would have avoided hunting the bigger, more deadly animals, or have been a gatherer society. That doesn’t really work in a world dominated by the largest, fastest predators that have ever been on the planet. Usain Bolt is currently the worlds fastest man and he tops out at about 26 to 27 MPH but not for a long time, meanwhile, his hunting party would be screaming and being eaten.

Hypothetical test (meaning it didn’t actually happen but if I pretend really loud, maybe). In a secret lab near Juarez, Mexico, we recently genetically modified four North American Grizzlies to grow to five thousand pounds with three inch teeth, twelve inch claws and a three inch thick, armor plated hide. We then took a group of twelve people, armed with bow and arrows, spears, and stone knives and gave them two weeks to study the habits of the bear monsters. Their mission was simple, using primitive weaponry and human adaptation, they needed to kill one bear monster. Of the twelve men and women there was one survivor, well half of one, well okay, none.

Example 2, Logic; Your rather large extended family of inbred, pre-flood mouth breathers decides to begin a small colony in the fertile crescent, a lush and plentiful landscape. Here they can plant crops and begin a small town where more relatives can move in and make more chromosomes meet other chromosomes that they would be better off not knowing. (The settlement size comes from the size of current, prehistoric style civilizations around the globe and the chromosomes comment comes from the idea that people on the Earth have been inbreeding nonstop since Cain and Abel took momma to the Spring cotillion) Your society plows the field, plants some crops and then… The crops get crushed, the neighbors get crushed, eaten or both and everything just roundly sucks; why? Because you have done the illogical thing of trying to build a society in less than two thousand years in the heart of a territory that would also be a migration path for one hundred and sixty five million years worth of dinosaurs, as well as several million years worth of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians and let’s not forget all the damned bugs. I have been looking for the math on how many people would have lived on the earth preflood and have found estimates from the tens of thousands to several million. There are no estimates on dinosaurs anywhere that I can find because of how many, freaking millions upon millions there would have been. People that think we coexisted have a hard time understanding large numbers and large animals.

Example 3, Education; They are trying to teach using faith. One definition of faith taken from our much beloved Dictionary is ” Belief that is not based on proof”. Teaching should be based on evidence and proof, ask your physics teacher. I don’t think I need to pick this one apart too much.

Example 4, Reproduction; The site uses artists to reproduce what it was like when man walked with dinosaurs. So, can I just draw something and it will be a reproduction of an actual historic event? The other day I was writing and I got bored and doodled some stick figures having an orgy on a box of cereal. Did I somehow stumble upon the knowledge of an ancient sexual rite of horny, skinny, bubble headed, puffed wheat devotees? No, I drew something and I don’t have a magic pen, unlike that cocky Simon prick. Drawing something doesn’t make it any more real, that’s what scientific testing does also sometimes peyote.

Example 5, Honesty; Do I really have to explain honesty to anyone? Here’s a thing, when you take facts and pretend like they are not actual facts because something you believe in, yet you have no actual proof of, would be woefully contradicted by them, you are lying. Lying is a sinny type thing that sends you to that Helly type place. Say you are married to a lovely lady that one day walks into your shared bedroom and finds you in flagrante delicto to your earlier vows of celibacy and respect. She screams , ” get out of this house”! You say “baby, it ain’t what you think it is, we were practicing a new kind of CPR”. Well, maybe baby wants to believe you so badly that in the face of all the nasty balls in the eye sockets facts, she takes you back and says to herself that it wasn’t what she doesn’t want to believe. That person would be lying to herself, when she talks to her friend Monique, she will lie to her and so on and so on. Bullshit, no matter how well received is still bullshit.

Example 6, Evaluation: Alright, does any of the evidence collected hold up enough to create a fact?

Well, no. Genesis Park is full of people that are just guessing and telling stories that they think are not that far fetched, which is the basis for most scientific discovery at its birth. They never give you real evidence though. They show you pictures of dinosaurs that were drawn by ancient man and say that it is proof. Ancient man dug a lot of holes to build their ancient man houses and a great way to discover fossils is digging holes. I would be willing to bet that when you dig something up that doesn’t make sense to you, you pull out the old Samsung and get a damn picture. ancient man didn’t have cameras but they had stone walls and paint. they would definitely document that discovery.

GP also has a few bible verses that they claim show the existence of dinosaurs. They have several versus they say point to dinosaurs and though I would dearly love to rip them all to pieces on at a time I think I have written too much already. I will just point out that the biblical scholars were not really that science minded. The book is full of hoodoo and magic and it seems, a lot of people that didn’t really get out in the oceans and really look at these nasty monsters they discuss. Getting up close to a shark can be a pretty shaking experience, or coming too close to a gator or any of the worlds vipers. How about a bear in the woods or a moose? These things can freak you out and scare you half crazy in the right circumstance and we know what they are. Could you imagine what your brain would make up if you saw a sixteen foot Crocodile come out of the mud and you had no idea what a croc was? You would shit clowns for a week and your brain would make up something really nuts to help you deal with what you saw.

Ahead of all the biblical and pictorial silliness however, GP also has a section they call “Cryptozoological evidence”. Fuzzy pictures and equally fuzzy story telling of such fabled monsters as, Loch Ness Monster, Lake Champlains Champ, Ogopogo and so on. Isn’t Cryptozoological just another way of saying you don’t have any reasonable evidence but you still believe in it? The answer is yes. Once you pull out the Cryptozoology token you may get kicked off the reality bus.

Anyway, thanks for reading the tirade, it went on too long but that can happen when faced with so much silliness.